Looking into the next five years from 2023-2027, the influences from COVID-19, the Russia-Ukraine war, US interest rate hikes and global inflation will be mitigating year after year while the trends of 5G phone upgrades and feature phone users in emerging markets transitioning to low-cost smartphones will carry on, allowing the market to resume growth.
Going into 2022, COVID-19 is only creating a limited impact on most parts of the world. Starting second-quarter 2022, smartphone components are no longer in tight supply and their prices have stopped soaring. However, the Russia-Ukraine war, rising global inflation and rapid interest rate hikes by the US Federal Reserve leading to the surging US dollar have taken a serious toll on consumer purchasing power in emerging countries.
Looking into 2023, the top-7 smartphone brands in terms of shipment volumes will be Samsung, Apple, Oppo, Xiaomi, Vivo, Transsion and Honor, together to ship nearly 1.04 billion phones and represent 86.4% of the global market.
Chart 2: Shipment to China and non-China markets, 2021-2023 (m units)
Chart 3: Top-7 smartphone vendors' shipments, 2022-2023 (m units)
Chart 4: Shipments by 5G and non-5G smartphones, 2022-2027 (m units)
Chart 5: China and non-China markets 5G smartphone shipments, 2021-2023 (m units)
Chart 6: Shipments by foldable display feature, 2022-2027 (m units)
